"No, you are mistaken," the dark-eyed girl said quietly. "We were making love with dignity, tenderness and beauty."
The gaunt woman's rage could no longer be constrained by anything short of violence. The words that came to her lips in reply were never uttered. She could no longer articulate and the words became a low muttering which continued even when she seized the hem of the girl's white garment and ripped it from her shoulders, baring her back from neck to waist.
She raised the whiplash and brought it down with all her strength on the girl's naked back. Three times she raised the punitive weapon and brought it down with relentless violence, her breath wheezing in her throat.
The thongs cut cruelly into the girl's flesh, raising long crimson welts, and sending her staggering forward. She raised her hands to her face and dropped to her knees, but she neither cringed nor cried out. She remained kneeling in an upright position, in an attitude that only great courage could have enabled her to maintain. She was trembling a little, but she continued to hold her shoulders straight and did not even moan when the whiplash descended for the fourth and last time.
The gaunt woman was raising the weapon for another blow when the man hurled himself against her, battering her with his shoulders and elbows until the whiplash went clattering and she collapsed backwards against the electronic scanner-glass, shaking but not shattering it, and sank with a groan to the floor.
She remained sprawled out on the floor for a full minute, clutching at her side, twisting about in pain, and trying several times to rise, her eyes darting in desperate appeal toward the guard. Her lips moved but no sound came from them, for her throat had been bruised so severely that her vocal cords throbbed dully and she could not even take a deep breath, or summon the strength to speak.
The girl's enraged lover came and stood over her, glaring savagely down at her and shaking his head in a vain attempt to dislodge the gag. He was not aware that the guard had caught and correctly interpreted the Monitor's unspoken message and was now standing directly behind him with a small, metallically gleaming hand-gun in his clasp.
The guard raised the weapon slowly and took careful aim, centering its double sights on a small mole in the middle of the enraged man's back.
The report of the weapon was loud in the Observatory, shaking the scanner-glass as violently as the Monitor's heavily collapsing body had done. The impact of its energy charge lifted the enraged man up and hurled him back against the wall. His body struck the wall and rebounded, hurling him forward to the floor.
He was dead before he struck the floor, but his lifeless body continued to move about erratically for a moment, from the impetus of the energy charge, and its slow dissipation throughout every organ and tissue of his body.